From global juggernauts to local government, this developer never stops serving

Like many kids worldwide, Eliot Pearson was passionate about Legos and video games. Those early experiences opened up a lifelong curiosity that continues to carry him forward.

“That did set me up for having this kind of analytical approach to, ‘Hey, how does this really work?’” said Pearson, who was born in Towson and grew up in the Baltimore area.

It led him to the Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC), first as a student and later as a web programmer for over six years. Through the next decade, Pearson held increasingly senior technical positions at AOL, Oath and Verizon Media — a progression that reflects the onetime instant messaging giant’s changing corporate fortunes.  

Pearson stayed rooted in his hometown, and went on to work at local tentpoles like technical training firm Catalyte and advertising tech company Enradius, attaining C-suite positions at both. Last September, he took his talents to the government of Baltimore County, where he is chief of enterprise applications. 

Throughout his career, the Hamilton-Lauraville neighborhood resident has served the local tech community as an advisor to Enradius. He’s also on the boards of CCBC’s computer science and IT program and Code in the Schools. 

“I always had a history of mentoring,” Pearson said, adding that he was drawn to Catalyte’s ability to scale a workforce development model to fill gaps in local tech. 

The former RealLIST Engineer and Connector spoke to us about this trajectory, his love of Baltimore, how communication mattered to his career and Maryland’s future innovation opportunity areas for our How I Got Here series. 

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

As a native of this region, why do you stay working here?

Baltimore is very unique: If you think about just the Baltimore metro, we have a lot of developed industries if you want to be a tech professional. You have a lot of education here — not only traditional education, but also research. We also have gaming up in Hunt Valley, and then a lot of advertising tech companies here, and a lot of security companies. And then, if you wanted to do a stretch, where you want to do some hybrid stuff, it’s very easy to get up to New York, Philly and also Washington DC.

You went through big multinational companies before going to more localized ones. What inspired this move, and what’s different between those experiences?

It was thousands of people [when] I worked for Community College of Baltimore County, before I went to AOL — which was tens of thousands of people because we were actually with Time Warner at a period of time. As I went to Catalyte, I think we were under 500 people.

The big difference is that when you work for a larger company, there’s a lot more infrastructure in place, a lot more process. Which can be good sometimes, where you’re like, ‘Hey, I just want to play with some new tech,’ and you’ll have larger companies [say], ‘Yes, we have these playgrounds.’ When you’re a smaller company, you have to justify those expenses and you may not be able to invest your time or resources in it. So you’ve got to be a little more scrappy with smaller companies, in my opinion.

You’ve also made a pivot from the private sector to this current government role. What prompted that shift, and what’s been the biggest transition?

At Catalyte, we really heavily invested in the public sector because we did outstanding jobs: We worked with Nike, Under Armour, T. Rowe Price — huge, huge success stories. As we really decided to try and get into the public sector, I was working with prime contractors, people who actually have direct contracts with the government, and I fell in love with it. I just thought it was amazing.

I also realized that the private sector has great opportunities, but the public sector does, too. And unfortunately, a lot of people don’t know about the public sector as much as they hear about the Googles and Facebooks of the world, but they’re really, really great places. … And that’s why I’m working for a local government.

So what do you do in this current role?

We have around 250 full-time employees in our centralized IT department; we call it the Office of Information Technology. My role is all of the applications we use, from Microsoft to externally facing payroll systems like Workday. We do all the support for those applications, we build applications and we also have designers on my team for the website.

We actually have a couple of websites. We have tourism websites for the county. We also have our central county [site] that anybody can go to get information. We have a website for our council. So I have about 50 people and we are handling all of the applications for over 900,000 in the county. Our services are also used by other people in the state, so over a million people are touching our applications every day.

What do you find most challenging about this position?

We run a transparent government, and because of that, we have a lot of code and legislation in place to make sure that we’re being responsible with public funds. So, the process of buying things and procuring things is very different than what you deal with in the private sector. … I’m one of the stewards to make sure that everything we’re purchasing is above board, making sure that we’re being responsible.

And that’s a layer that I hadn’t experienced until now. I’ve always had a budget, but some of the things where we need to review our contracts that come in, and we need to [act in accordance] with state law or county law — that’s a little bit different when you’re coming at it from the private sector. That’s one thing that’s been really different and it has been a challenge, but a welcome challenge. I’m learning new things every day.

What advice do you have for anybody interested in a career like yours, whether in the private sector or government?

Communication is so important. One skill that you can do a lot with, in any stage of your career, is to communicate, if not overcommunicate. That really helps because you’re part of a team. Nobody’s just a one-person shop, you’re part of a team and an organization.

When I look at where industries are growing — let’s say you’re in college now, or you’re in high school, and you’re like, “What do I really want to do in tech when I get older?” I would look at these emerging fields of cybersecurity and also artificial intelligence. Those are areas where I think you would not have a problem finding opportunities in the future. Those have really big upsides, and we’re going to see a lot of growth and development in those sectors.